GustoForte: Quinto Quarto

€13.00 On Sale

Limited-edition, 180-gram, clear vinyl

Rome is a city of oxymora. An antithesis of History and stories. A perennial contradiction between cement and people. Between freedom and reason. Between sex and destructive desires. The city's inhabitants build their reality out of the imagination of an entire population, almost as though they were a polycephalic slime, a miry, unicellular mould capable of accomplishing extraordinary wonders, almost on the verge of animal intelligence. After all, what more can you expect from a mob that is used to perpetuating itself on top of an endless landfill of the dead? The only race that managed to murder a god without staining its hands with blood, that has begotten popes and nourished princes and duces. Perennial children of a river filled with stories, lies, and shit. They smile at all the world's misfortunes because nothing can hurt them any more. Their own gravediggers, they keep vigil at their ceaseless funeral.
Forget "great wonders" and the rhetoric of suffocating, painted ladies of the illustrious left.
GustoForte was born and took shape in that broth of bones and unhealthy meat unlike any other in the world, and after thirty years, they're back with an album full of rancour, melancholy hatred, and infinite passion for their city. After thirty years, they've returned with a work that is post-everything, entitled "Quinto Quarto" ('Fifth Quarter') after the main ingredient of Rome's traditional cooking: the animal intestines, hearts, stomachs, kidneys, tongues, and entrails that once represented the poor food of neglected people.
But for GustoForte, "Quinto Quarto" also represents the remains of the world of the performing arts, a landfill made up of cultures fallen into disuse, tampered sounds, and the background noises of the modern world.
A hypnotic, post-psychedelic stream, flowing lethargically like the Tiber, the dark blood of the city's veins.
Like in the piece "Quinto Quarto", where a no wave flood crashes within an ecstatic, centrifuged tribalism. Or "Divino Amore (con Resilienza Morbosa)", an apocalyptic tango that sounds like it came out of an unlikely encounter between the valet of a Roman osteria and a group of African immigrants in the grips of a terminal neurodegenerative disease. The track features GustoForte's singing, a language composed of leftover phrases punctuated by a stuttering glottis and a mixture of languages that make up the audible background of the Roman suburbs. Or also "MaglianaSettanta (per Nastro Magnetico)", a sordid, obscene pagan rite that loses itself within an impotent tribalism with no way out.
Then there's "Natura Morta in via Cesare Beccaria, 22 (per Vhs, Giradischi e Strappi Improvvisi)", a long track dedicated to Fabio Sargentini and his art gallery "L'attico", the last point of cultural vitality of the city of Rome, a space where the most original individuals of the international art scene once collided: from Gino De Dominicis to Luigi Ontani, along with Jannis Kounellis, Alighiero Boetti, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Charlemagne Palestine, and Joan La Barbera.
The piece is divided into four parts (*at 20:30 De Dominicis, *at 21:48 Ontani, *at 22:56 Schifano non passa, and *at 23:59 Boetti) and features the phonetic singing of Terra Di Benedetto of Albergo Intergalattico Spaziale, one of the most original groups of Italy's avant-garde music scene of the Seventies. It is a song that rewrites the meaning and significance of Italian experimental psychedelia. A journey with no return into the space and time of Rome.
"Quinto Quarto" is an essential work for Italy's musical experimentation and an incredibly topical comeback for one of the most interesting and original groups of the European scene: GustoForte